bovard-brian-wilson-show-5-15-2012-tsa-tribute

This is National Police Week in Washington.

The photo above is the second-most popular non-tattoo photo on my Flickr page.

I took it at a DC Police Week event a few years ago. I wonder if this cop’s bike has since qualified for a disability pension.

If it becomes as politically profitable to bust freedom activists as it currently is to bust Muslims, we will see a surge of entrapment schemes and a deluge of libertarians indicted as public enemies. And remember: “entrapment” has been defined almost out of existence by judges and federal agencies.

Tom Blanton, the mastermind of the Project for a New American Revolution, asked an excellent question on Claire Wolfe’s blog on Saturday: “How many libertarians will go to jail because they trusted someone merely on the basis of that person claiming to be a libertarian?”

Claire Wolfe is producing an E-book on how to avoid government informants. You can help her out by posting at her blog or contacting her via the blog.

Here’s a repost of a piece I did for Playboy in the mid-1990s. Things have gotten worse since then.

Playboy March, 1995

Uncle Scam wants you: could you be set up by the government to commit a crime?

By James Bovard

Could you be set up by the government to commit a crime?

It began with an act of generosity. Jennifer Skarie, a 41-year-old mother of three, let one of her ex-husband’s relatives, John Byrd, move onto her ranch in Valley Center, California in late 1988. She became alarmed, however, when he used methamphetamine in her house and pressured her to put him in touch with people who would sell him drugs. Then, according to the subsequent court record, “He began to make sexual advances toward her and the women living with her. Byrd was a violent person who threatened others regularly and was usually armed, even in the house.”

Skarie finally evicted him. “Byrd reacted violently to being thrown out,” the court noted, “and made a variety of threats against Jennifer Skarie. In February 1989, he asked Skarie to put him in touch with some people who could sell him drugs. Skarie demurred. Byrd continued to pressure her; he would call as often as ten times a day and would often come by Skarie’s house uninvited. Byrd also threatened Skarie and other members of the household. He impaled one of her chickens on a stick and left it outside her back door. He later stated that what had happened to the chicken could happen to people as well. He told Skarie that it would be easy to slit the throats of her horses, and he threatened to kidnap her six-year-old son, ’so that you will never see him again.’”

Skarie finally relented and arranged for him to buy methamphetamine from a person she knew. As soon as the sale was completed, she was arrested for possession of narcotics with intent to distribute. The relative turned out to be an undercover government drug agent.

After a vigorous federal prosecution, Skarie was sentenced to ten years in prison without parole. The U.S. Justice Department apparently believes putting a person in contact with another person to purchase an illegal Substance is a worse crime than killing animals and threatening to kidnap children.

It’s called entrapment, and it has been the subject of debate in the courts for decades. It is also the weapon of choice in the war on drugs.

Fortunately, a federal appeals court overturned the Skarie conviction, but the case illustrates the zeal with which the government pushes the definition of lawful entrapment.

Entrapment schemes have proliferated partly because it is easier to manufacture crime than to protect private citizens. Such schemes wreck people’s lives in order to boost arrest statistics; entrapment epitomizes the triumph of a “body count” approach to law enforcement. Some politicians have sought to justify entrapment as a necessary response to the crime wave in recent years. Thus, the more government fails to prevent crime, the more power it should have to violate people’s constitutional rights–the worse that police fail, the more power they deserve.

Up until the early Seventies, defendants often successfully challenged entrapment as a violation of due process. But in 1973, the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, gutted most defenses against government entrapment by focusing almost solely on the “subjective disposition” of the entrapped person. If prosecutors can find any inkling of a defendant’s disposition to the crime, went Rehnquist’s logic, then the person is guilty, no matter how outrageous or abusive the government agents’ behavior. Justice William Brennan dissented, warning that the decision could empower law enforcement agents to “round up and jail all ‘predisposed’ individuals.”

In Los Angeles, police officers went undercover to pose as high school students in order to implore other students to buy drugs for them. The kids who did were arrested, expelled and permanently denied federal college loans.

The American Civil Liberties Union complained: “When other adults try to get young people involved with drugs, we call it contributing to the delinquency of a minor. When the LAPD does it, we call it the school-buy program.”

When the ACLU sued the San Diego police to put an end to similar undercover operations, Gregory Marshall of the ACLU put the practice into perspective: “Anybody would be outraged if they learned that the co-worker at the next desk or the shortstop on the softball team turned out to be a police spy. Obviously, the schools are not the place for secret police undercover operations.”

In late 1992 and in 1993, New Jersey school systems were compelled by the state attorney general’s orifice to authorize police undercover operations (called school zone narcotics enforcement working groups), despite the strong objections of some school officials.

In 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis saw a simple distinction between fair law enforcement and the abuse of power. “The government may set decoys to entrap criminals,” he wrote. “But it may not provoke or create a crime and then punish the criminal, its creature.” Some decoy operations are laughable but efficient. In Michigan, policemen have dressed in street clothes, loitered in areas known for drug activity and then arrested those who asked to buy drugs. Predisposed? Yes. Stupid? You bet.

The drug trade is driven by profits–profits that exist largely because of federal efforts to suppress the drug trade (some argue that the law creates the profit). Greed is a human enough predisposition, but it doesn’t make you a criminal. What happens when the government gives itself license to manipulate citizens? Most Americans have no direct contact with drug lords–so the government has stepped in to rectify that lost opportunity. Federal drug officials have enticed individuals to accept government money and a government-supplied airplane to fly to Colombia to pick up cocaine; when the person returns, he is busted. A rare occurrence? Unfortunately, no. “Controlled deliveries” accounted for more than half of all the cocaine seized in south Florida in the late Eighties.

Such volume raises the question: If it weren’t for Uncle Sam, exactly how big would the drug epidemic be?

When you pay freelance operatives or government employees to become junior G-men, you create bullies and bureaucrats whose sole goal is to create new business. And, in a delicious twist, some of the victims are Uncle Sam’s own employees. The Postal Inspection Service has specialized in sting schemes. In Minneapolis, one undercover inspector took advantage of a mail sorter’s depression about his wife’s recent death from brain cancer to ply him with marijuana–and then got him arrested and fired.

In Cleveland, 20 postal workers were fired because of the false information provided by informants, many of whom stole government funds. Postal inspectors nationwide have encouraged abusive entrapment schemes because the Postal Service gave them cash bonuses based on the numbers of busts of employees–a “dollars for collars” program. In May 1994 Congressman William Clay, then chairman of the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, declared: “These are the kinds of activities–illegal as hell–that the Postal Inspection Service has been involved with for the past ten years.”

Clearer heads have seen the wrongness of entrapment. In a 1966 dissent, Justice William Douglas warned, “Entrapment is merely a facet of a much broader problem. Together with illegal searches and seizures, coerced confessions, wiretapping and bugging, it represents lawless invasion of privacy. It is indicative of a philosophy that the end justifies the means.”

For Douglas the government does not belong in the bedroom–for any reason. Unfortunately, his view has not prevailed. In 1987, a federal appeals court sanctioned the government use of sex in order to persuade people to break the law: “The deceptive creation and/or exploitation of an intimate relationship does not exceed the boundary of permissible law enforcement tactics.”

What happens when cops go looking for love in all the wrong places?

In the Los Angeles school-buy program, a female undercover police ofricer had a relationship with a 17-yearold high school football player whom she constantly begged for information about where she could get drugs. He tried to get her to seek counseling; she wrote him sexually explicit letters. He may have had a predisposition–but it wasn’t for drugs. When he finally arranged a buy, the love of his life turned him in. In the glare of publicity, the agent’s superiors refused to prosecute–finding her methods questionable. This government-sponsored sex ed provoked considerable outrage.

Raymond Harrington, a judge in Nassau County, New York, dismissed charges in 1993 against a teacher who had fallen prey to an undercover cop who became her best friend, her confidant and her business manager. He eventually enticed her into making a few small cocaine buys and then threatened to ruin her life unless she became an informant against a motorcycle gang. Her lawyer observed: “The police chose to try to terrorize her into agreeing to help them.”

The proliferation of entrapment represents the triumph of an authoritarian concept of justice–as if government should be allowed to do anything it chooses to catch anyone it thinks might be a criminal. As Gail Greaney wrote in 1992 in the Notre Dame Law Review, “With each case, it appears that the line of intolerable police conduct is being pushed further toward the outlandish.”

The U.S. should take a lesson from new democracies such as Poland and the Czech Republic, both of which have banned almost all types of entrapment schemes. At a minimum, Americans called to jury duty should stand up for moral principle and refuse to convict their fellow citizens snared by government misconduct. Principled juries that refused to convict helped bring an end to Prohibition, and the same stand against tyrannical tactics can once again force politicians and police to listen to the people.

James Bovard is author of “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty.”

I have written about government informants over the past couple decades, and they are often far more dangerous than they appear. There is no reason to assume that informants will constrain themselves to the facts. Once they start singing, they get ‘brownie points’ for creativity. The more scalps they bring in, the lighter their sentence - or the larger their cash bonus.

And you don’t need to buy drugs from them to get busted. All that is necessary is that you allegedly told them where they might procure illicit substances.

Details in this 1997 article which, unfortunately, is not out-of-date.

Playboy December 1997

HEADLINE: Time out for justice: why talking about drugs is worse than murder.

by James Bovard

Politicians in Washington are demanding a new crackdown on–and harsher penalties for–cocaine users, among other narcotics violators. Yet before the nation embarks on drug war number 327, we should stop and examine what our political ruling class has already achieved. The files of the November Coalition, Families Against Mandatory Minimums and various media accounts are filled with horror stories. It is worthwhile to compare sentences that are given to drug offenders with those received by murderers, rapists, child molesters, armed robbers and other victims of difficult childhoods.

Jose Tapia, along with a friend, carried out “the largest mass murder in Rhode Island history,” according to Providence prosecutors in 1996. Tapia and his buddy intentionally set fire to the home of a family of Guatemalan immigrants. Six people (including four children) died in the flames. (Typically, the criminals were both evil and stupid: Tapia and his friend were trying to torch someone else’s home but got confused.) Tapia received a sentence that will make him eligible for parole in 21 years. By contrast, Kyle Lindquist, a 36-year-old excavating contractor and father of three, was busted in 1992 on conspiracy charges of intent to possess and distribute 1000 kilos or more of marijuana. Lindquist got a sentence of 23 years with no possibility of parole. Apparently, conspiring to hustle some weed is worse than burning down a house full of children.

Rodney Kelley murdered two brothers in 1991 near a New Orleans freeway overpass, shooting each in the head and robbing the corpses. The police caught Kelley but then prosecutors allowed him to plead guilty to manslaughter, which meant an eight-year sentence–and eligibility for parole after only four years. By contrast, Will Foster, a 38-year-old software programmer and father of three, grew marijuana in his basement to treat his severe rheumatoid arthritis. Based on a bogus tip from a supposed “confidential informant” that Foster was selling methamphetamine, police raided his home. While no methamphetamine was found, police did find about 70 marijuana plants, many of which were seedlings. Because Foster was a first-time offender, the judge let him off with a 93-year sentence.

William Edward Neusteter used a handgun to rob a 7-Eleven and several of its customers in Denver in 1995. District judge R. Michael Mullins sentenced Neusteter, the son of a prominent local businessman, to five years’ probation. Similarly, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who went berserk and began shooting at kids who were spray-painting graffiti, and who engaged in a high-speed chase and then lied about the circumstances, was convicted of “assault with a firearm, gross negligent discharge of a firearm, shooting from a vehicle and filing a false report.” Sheriff’s Deputy Bobby Rodriguez could have faced 14 years in prison, but he received five years’ probation. By contrast, Amy Marie Kacsor and many other luckless individuals have had five years added to their federal prison sentences merely because firearms were found in their homes by police searching for illicit substances. Kacsor, a 26-year-old Michigan resident, was busted for growing marijuana in her basement. The police searched her house and found two registered handguns owned by her mother, as well as two hunting rifles owned by Kacsor’s boyfriend. Federal judge Stewart Newblatt denounced the additional sentencing as vicious.

In July 1995 Anthony Brown and his brother beat and raped a woman in Atlanta within days of Anthony’s release from prison on armed robbery charges. Brown pleaded guilty to rape and received a one-year prison sentence. Under the state mandatory sentencing law, he should have received life in prison as a repeat violent offender, but prosecutors decided to be nice. His brother, who also pleaded guilty, was required to submit to five years of “intensive” probation. By contrast, Todd Davidson, a 27-year-old Deadhead, was originally sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiracy to possess LSD with intent to distribute. A friend with whom he shared a motel room sold some acid to federal agents. Davidson was caught in the same net, and he was found guilty partly on the basis of a remark made prior to the sale.

Daniel Green received a six-year sentence after using an ax to smash the skull of a 17-year-old boy and almost killing him (the victim was in a coma for three months and suffered permanent brain damage). North Carolina prison officials were beneficent and set Green free after he had served just a third of his sentence. Two months after he was paroled, Green and Larry Demery murdered Michael Jordan’s father, James, and stole his Lexus. By contrast, Christopher Sia was initially sentenced to 24 years in federal prison after he was set up by an undercover federal agent. Sia’s sentence was determined by a peculiar guideline that bases LSD penalties on the weight of the drug and its “carrier medium”–in this case blotter paper and a liquid solvent. Despite a modification in the sentencing guidelines, LSD offenders continue to receive disproportionately severe sentences.

Edwin “Fast Eddie” McBirney received a five-year sentence for fraudulent practices (such as using federally insured deposits to pay for sex parties) that wrecked his Texas savings and loan and cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $70 million. McBirney served slightly more than half of his sentence. By contrast, Kelly Hackett, a 29-year-old Ohio resident, got a five-year sentence after a “friend” (who turned out to be a government informant) brought an undercover agent to her house. They wanted to buy some crack. Hackett called an acquaintance, who sold them 5.4 grams of crack. Four months later, Hackett was arrested. Thousands of Americans are serving five years in federal prison (with no parole) after being apprehended in possession of less than two pennies’ weight of crack–a mere five grams. Thanks to propagandists of the drug war, crack holds a special place on the political demonology honor roll of the late 20th century. First offenders who have never even been caught jaywalking automatically receive five years in prison, thereby making reelection campaigns safe for incumbent congressmen.

Elmer Tate of Warwick, Rhode Island admitted guilt in three separate child-molestation cases, in 1992, 1994 and 1996. Yet each time, local judges awarded him a suspended sentence. Apparently, the molesting of children may or may not deserve punishment, depending on the whims of judges and prosecutors. By contrast, the mere hearing of certain words is a hanging offense. Loren Pogue, a middle-aged real estate agent, got snared in 1990 because he agreed to help a friend sell a plot of Costa Rican land. Because the buyers–undercover agents–mentioned that they intended to use the mountainside as a landing strip for Colombian cocaine flights, Pogue was convicted of conspiracy to import, possess and distribute cocaine. Regardless of the absurdity of the scheme, the fact that the word cocaine was mentioned at the closing of the real estate deal earned Pogue 27 years.

The Reverend Richard Rossi Jr., pastor of the First Love Church in Pittsburgh, was charged with attempted murder after his wife identified him as the attacker who beat her nearly to death while they were house-hunting in a Pittsburgh suburb. In 1995 Rossi was permitted to plead no contest to second-degree aggravated assault and served 96 days in jail. Upon his release he announced he was writing two screenplays. By contrast, Donald Clark, a farmer in Manatee County, Florida, was caught with 900 marijuana plants by state officials in the mid-Eighties. After serving time in a Florida state prison, he assumed his debt to society was paid. But in 1988 federal prosecutors decided to pursue conspiracy charges against Clark. As the St. Petersburg Times noted, “Since he was charged under federal racketeering laws, he was considered responsible for every seedling ever grown in Manatee County during the Eighties. That added up to a million plants.” He received life without the chance of parole.

The average murderer serves eight years in prison. According to Julie Stewart of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, many people have been sentenced to ten years or longer merely for “conspiracy” via indiscreet discussions with federal informants–”dry cases,” in which no illicit drugs are directly linked to the defendant. With our current moral-judicial system, talking about drugs disapproved of by politicians is a worse crime than killing citizens. In one five-year period beginning in 1986 the average prison sentence for drug offenses nearly tripled (from 27 months to 78 months). The number of people in federal and state prisons on drug charges has increased tenfold since 1980; since 1987, drug defendants have accounted for nearly three quarters of all new federal prisoners.

Under federal sentencing guidelines, a person is entitled to the same five-year prison ticket for possession of five grams of crack that he would receive for embezzling between $10 million and $20 million from a bank–or for using a threat of violence to extort between $2.5 million and $5 million from someone, or for kidnapping someone and seriously injuring the victim. Obviously, crack is terrible stuff.

Politicians seek to portray drug users and dealers as incurably heinous, yet they ignore the fact that three quarters of people sentenced to state prisons on drug charges have no history of criminal violence. Last year, the number of people sentenced to prison for drug crimes significantly exceeded the number of people sentenced for violent crimes. At a time when most big cities have a record number of unsolved murders on the books, more than 19,000 state and local law enforcement officials are assigned to the drug war on a full-time basis.

Florida State University economists Bruce Benson and David Rasmussen looked at the situation and concluded that cracking down on’ drugs unintentionally fosters theft, burglary and other property crimes because law enforcement resources are diverted. Their study notes that between 1982 and 1987, when Florida police focused on drug-law enforcement, drug arrests rose 90 percent, while total arrests rose only 32 percent. Property crimes escalated, with robbery rates rising 34 percent and auto thefts by 65 percent. As more resources are allocated to fight drug crime, the chance of arrest for property crime falls.

Politicians receive billions of dollars from citizens each year to fund the criminal justice system and provide police protection. But more than 5 million Americans were victims of violent crime last year. The only explanation for lawmakers’ obsession with penalizing drug offenders while neglecting public safety is that they are far more anxious to control us than to protect us. As always, the lesson of political history is the same: Save us from our saviors.

TSA — Tenth Anniversary of a National Nightmare

by James Bovard

Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush promised Americans, “We will not surrender our freedom to travel.” In hindsight, he may have been referring to himself and other high-ranking government officials. Because for all other Americans, airline travel has become more arduous and more perilous in the past ten years.

The Bush administration and Congress responded to the 9/11 hijackers with the usual Washington panacea — creating a new federal agency. The Federal Aviation Administration was widely perceived as inept, if not incorrigible. Instead of razing the failed bureaucracy and attempting to remedy the profound flaws in the federal approach to aviation, Congress and Bush “solved” the problem of airline safety by creating a new federal agency and vesting it with sweeping power and near-zero responsibility.

Last November marked the tenth anniversary of the Transportation Security Administration. The TSA has done wonders for the sale of latex gloves and 3-ounce plastic containers, but that is probably the extent of its positive impact.

The TSA has made U.S. air travel more uncertain. Shortly after it was created, the Transportation secretary, Norman Mineta, proclaimed a goal that passengers would not have to wait more than ten minutes to clear TSA checkpoints. He hyped the slogan “No weapons, no waiting.” That was the air-travel equivalent of offering to sell people the Brooklyn Bridge. But for anyone who doubted whether the TSA would perform as promised, Bush warned, “If we get impatient, the terrorists win.”

When the TSA began hiring screeners, Mineta announced that the agency would “hire the best and the brightest” for the new jobs. But not all TSA hiring processes have been biased in favor of intelligence.

“Training”

TSA screener applicants in New York were not required to show any ability to detect weapons and were given tests that were surprisingly easy. Clark Kent Ervin, the inspector general for the Homeland Security Department, complained that some of the test questions “are simply inane.” The test asked would-be screeners why they should bother looking for smuggled bombs:

Question: Why is it important to screen bags for IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices]?
a. The IED batteries could leak and damage other passenger bags.
b. The wires in the IED could cause a short to the aircraft wires.
c. IEDs can cause loss of lives, property, and aircraft.
d. The ticking timer could worry other passengers.

The inspector general report did not disclose how many TSA screeners chose a wrong answer.

In 2003, Newsday reported pervasive cheating on TSA tests by screeners hired at LaGuardia Airport and elsewhere across the nation. Class instructors read the tests to students beforehand, made sure students understood the correct answers, and then gave the tests. One screener commented, “They knew that they would need us to fill these positions, so we were not allowed to fail.” One St. Louis screener said she received “only about 40 minutes of hands-on training on two explosives-detection machines, instead of the day and a half pre-scribed by the TSA. One machine, which produces computer images of each bag’s interior, was not working, so instructors ‘just said if it was running, this is what would happen.’” Several people hired to teach airport screeners also reported having been given test answers before taking the tests to become certified instructors.

The TSA provided abysmal training to many of the new bomb catchers. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on August 25, 2002, that “dozens of members of an elite team of federal airport screeners received as little as 15 minutes’ training before starting to inspect baggage for bombs.” The screeners were members of the TSA’s Mobile Screening Force, which moved around the country to lead the way in federalizing airport security. One disgruntled new “expert” screener complained, “They handed us a swab and told us to wipe the bags this way and put us to work. The whole thing took 10, 15 minutes tops.” The law Congress enacted in late 2001 required “security screeners” to receive at least 100 hours of training. The Chronicle noted that the new screeners said their “requests for proper training have been ignored.”

The TSA admitted in mid 2003 that it had grossly failed to screen its own screeners. Once hired, more than 1,200 TSA employees were fired after failing criminal background checks or other internal investigations. A 2004 inspector general report revealed that the raw numbers were only the tip of the iceberg. At a time when TSA officials were assuring the American public of the agency’s savvy, 500 boxes of documents representing the background checks for 20,000 TSA screeners were piled away and went unexamined for months.

The TSA used lower standards for security clearances than the FAA required for private screeners hired before 9/11. The inspector general found that at one airport, the TSA hired 13 screeners with serious criminal convictions (rape, burglary, manslaughter, et cetera). It allowed a dozen of the felons to continue working for months even after the agency discovered that they had failed their criminal-background checks.

The TSA has recently been harshly criticized for its Body Imaging X-ray machines that not only destroy privacy but also emit dangerous levels of radiation. But many people are unaware that the TSA is renowned for blundering with technology.

The Aviation and Transportation Security Act of November 2001 required that by December 31, 2002, all airline baggage be run through bomb-detection machinery or checked with hand-held bomb detectors. The TSA spent billions of dollars buying minivan-sized machines and hand-held detectors to protect travelers from bombs. Unfortunately, the machines that it rushed to buy are very unreliable, giving false positives for almost a third of all luggage. After a machine signals a false alert, the bag has to be searched by hand. Such searches have spurred more than 10,000 complaints to the TSA about luggage lost, stolen, or damaged while under TSA jurisdiction. A TSA screener who was caught stealing $5,000 worth of jewelry from someone’s luggage was fired and sentenced in April 2004 to five years’ probation and six months’ home detention, and was fined $2,000.

False alarms

False explosives alarms have disrupted many airports. On November 12, 2003, hundreds of people were evacuated from Indianapolis International airport after an explosives trace-detection test gave a positive reading. The bag was held at the checkpoint while the owner left and caught his flight. A bomb squad later determined that the explosives alarm was triggered by an electric toothbrush and a hair-care product. On April 16, 2004, a terminal at Los Angeles International Airport was evacuated and flights were delayed after the TSA agents summoned the bomb squad over luggage containing a stack of poker chips and a Palm Pilot.

Heart patients have often been wrongly tagged by the TSA as would-be terrorists. Much of the Portland airport was shut down on January 5, 2004, in large part because screeners were spooked by an elderly man who tested positive for nitroglycerin. TSA spokeswoman Jennifer Marty told the Portland Oregonian that the shutdown could have been avoided if the passenger “had promptly disclosed that he was taking heart medication containing nitroglycerin.”

The New York Daily News reported in 2004 that “many common brands of hand lotions set off the explosives trace detection machines at U.S. airports’ new screening stations. Dozens if not hundreds of times a day, someone’s bag or shoe tests positive for glycerin — a substance widely used to smooth skin but which is also found in nitroglycerin, a main component of dynamite.” One TSA screener working at a Midwestern airport commented, “This happens five or six times during an eight-hour shift.” TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis explained why hand-lotion false alarms are another success story: “Passengers should be confident that [detection] machines are finding even a trace of this substance. It shows the system is working as it should.”

Even false alarms that do not shut down airport corridors can disrupt a traveler’s plans. On October 25, 2003, TSA agents at Norfolk International Airport were alarmed, as Airport Security Report gravely noted, after

a novelty dog toy, which breaks wind as it bends over, set off an explosives detector. The life-size mechanical terrier alerted screeners and armed law enforcement officers after it registered as TNT on an explosives trace machine. FBI agents grilled the man in possession of the toy, a 31-year-old male from England. A series of swabs were taken from the replica animal’s rear end. Officers were convinced an explosive was inside the dog. Officers eventually returned the dog but stopped the passenger from taking his planned flight to Charlotte, N.C., and rerouted him via Philadelphia.

It is unclear whether it is official TSA policy to automatically route potentially exploding canines through Philadelphia. The TSA has snubbed mandates by Congress to upgrade its bomb-catching skills. In the 2003 appropriations act for the TSA, Congress allotted $75 million for research to develop better explosives-detection equipment. The TSA ignored the law and instead spent $60 million of that money on salaries for TSA officials. Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman for the House Aviation Subcommittee, groused that instead of developing new technology, “TSA’s become expert in taking nail clippers from little old ladies.”

The TSA has always been profoundly irresponsible and dishonest. Rather than making Americans safe from terrorists, it has made them prey to federal agents. There is no reason to expect the agency to turn over a new leaf. The TSA has no liability to any American citizen it abuses or delays. It offers proof after proof of the fraudulent nature of the federal security blanket. Its follies are a warning to Americans not to expect safety from mindless, arbitrary power.

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation.

You can listen or download the MP3 by clicking on the following link -
bovard-brian-wilson-show-5-10-2012-happiness-index-wine

The interview lasted about 14 minutes.

Bad news from this cartoon from the new issue of the New Yorker.

This is going to be hell on online discussions.

Wall Street Journal

Don’t Worry (About GDP), Be Happy
With the economy slow and joblessness high, the feds want a new way to measure well-being.

by James Bovard

In recent years, numerous experts have declaimed that the gross domestic product is a flawed measure of whether citizens are truly thriving. President Obama’s designee for World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, for example, warned that “the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.”

In light of this growing concern, the Obama administration is financing research to devise a new measure of happiness. A National Academy of Sciences panel is analyzing proposals for surveying Americans’ “subjective well-being” to guide federal policy making. But constructing a federal happiness index would be a tricky undertaking.

The Census Bureau is advising the happiness survey panel. Measuring moods is far more difficult than counting people, but Census doesn’t even do a good job of that—as I learned working for the bureau in southern Illinois in 1980. As long as census takers didn’t get arrested for drunkenness or public indecency and returned at the end of the day with a stack of filled-out forms, the bosses were satisfied.

There are other perils to be considered. Would the feds manipulate happiness statistics like they jigger the unemployment rate? If someone failed to actively seek joy during the previous six-month period, would they be formally excluded from the official count? Would government officials invent “seasonal adjustments” to disregard month-to-month swings in reported despondency?

Another question worth pondering: Is there any reason to expect a federal happiness index to be more credible than the inflation rate? Would official mood surveys disregard any unhappiness felt by middle-aged men losing their hair—the same way the Consumer Price Index often ignores jumps in housing and food prices?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics now reduces the official inflation rate by “hedonic adjustments” purportedly related to the rise in quality of consumer products. Perhaps the feds could then ratchet up the reported happiness rate by imputing the extra contentment that would exist if people actually recognized all the wonderful things government did for them.

At a Brookings Institution workshop last November, leading happiness-survey experts (including National Academy of Science panelists) suggested that “policy makers may want to educate the public and present metrics so that a growth in well-being from, say, 7.2 to 7.4 provides as much meaning as would a 2 percent growth in GDP.” Could the presentation of such metrics “educate” people to the point that it distracted them from the misery they suffered in recessions? Probably not, unless accompanied by massive doses of Prozac.

Anyone who still reveres federal statistics should remember the “multipliers” of the past few years. We were told that every dollar spent on the 2009 stimulus package would produce $1.57 in economic activity. That every dollar of food stamps “generates $1.84 in economic activity.” That every dollar of unemployment benefits begets a $2 increase in economic activity. According to those formulas, a robust recovery arrived two years ago.

With “subjective well-being” surveys to guide federal policy-making, might we be assured that deficit spending automatically has a “happiness multiplier” of 2.4? The proliferation of such multipliers would be limited only by the number of social scientists eager to receive federal grants to produce them.

Politicians will use happiness surveys as a trump card against any attempt to limit spending. Suppose an inspector general’s report obliterates any sober justification for a program’s existence. Congressmen can respond by invoking survey results showing that lofty rhetoric about the program’s noble intentions spurs a wave of mass contentment. Make-work boondoggles like AmeriCorps could be magically transformed into “make happiness” triumphs.

A common saying during the 1930s was that “we cannot squander our way to prosperity.” Similarly, we cannot statistically delude ourselves to national happiness.

Mr. Bovard, the author of “Attention Deficit Democracy” (Palgrave, 2006), is working on a memoir.

*

It was inspiring to hear Obama invoking the usual idealism during his spiel from Bagram Air Base. The event was nicely managed insofar as there were no blood-piercing screams during his speech from detainees being tortured.

Oh - that’s right. There isn’t any more torture in Afghanistan….

[*another excellent cartoon from the Washington Post's Tom Toles]

The comment from the Infamous Oregon Lawhobbit spurred my memory on the Justice Department’s anti-terror PR coup in Oregon. Here’s my riff on that case from the December 2009 issue of Freedom Daily:

One of the best-known material-witness cases involved Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer, whom the FBI arrested in 2004 for his alleged involvement in the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 and left 2,000 wounded. A U.S. counterterrorism official told Newsweek that Mayfield’s fingerprint was an “absolutely incontrovertible match” to a copy of the fingerprint found on a bag of bomb detonators near the scene of the Madrid attack. News of Mayfield’s arrest provided alarming evidence that Americans were involved in international conspiracies to slaughter civilians around the globe, and he was informed that he could face the death penalty for his crimes.

Employing USA PATRIOT Act powers, the feds, prior to the arrest, conducted secret searches of Mayfield’s home and tapped his phone and email. After the arrest, they froze his bank accounts. The FBI’s arrest affidavit revealed that its agents had “observed Mayfield drive to the Bilal Mosque located at 415 160th Ave., Beaverton, Oregon, on several different occasions.” Another incriminating detail in the arrest warrant: he had advertised his legal service in the Muslim Yellow Pages. (Mayfield, a former Army lieutenant, converted to Islam and has an Egyptian wife.) In early April, the Spanish police described Mayfield “as a U.S. military veteran who was already under investigation by U.S. authorities for alleged ties to Islamic terrorism,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Yet the key to the case — the fingerprint — was as bogus as a politician’s campaign promise. The FBI quickly claimed to have achieved a match on the partial print, but, on April 13, Spanish government officials warned the FBI that their experts were “conclusively negative” that Mayfield’s print matched the print on the bomb detonator bag.

Mayfield was arrested as a “material witness,” thereby permitting the feds to hold him as long as they pleased without charging him with a specific crime. After he was arrested, FBI agents raided his home and office and carted off boxes of his papers and his family’s belongings. Among the items seized were “miscellaneous Spanish documents,” according to an FBI statement to the federal court. These supposedly incriminating papers turned out to be the Spanish homework of Mayfield’s son. Perhaps elite FBI investigators suspected that “Hola, Paco. Como estas?” was a secret code.

Though the FBI never possessed anything on Mayfield aside from a misidentified fingerprint, it did not hesitate to paint him in sinister colors. The FBI informed a federal judge, “It is believed that Mayfield may have traveled under a false or fictitious name.” But Mayfield, whose passport expired the previous year, insisted he had not left the country. The FBI apparently never bothered to check whether he had been absent from the United States before making one of the most high-profile terrorism arrests of the year.

The FBI’s evidence was a heap of unsubstantiated hokum and ludicrous inferences. But the Justice Department refused to release Mayfield until after the Spanish government announced that they had found a clean match to the fingerprints on the bomb-detonator bag.

Another great NonSequitor cartoon from Wiley

The Folly of Federal Training

by James Bovard

his State of the Union address President Obama proposed an array of new federal job training programs. This was one of the more popular facets of his speech, and the usual media cheerleaders swooned. However, Uncle Sam has a long and dismal training record, and new federal programs would be almost guaranteed to repeat past follies.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, with his Works Progress Administration (WPA), fathered modern government training and employment programs. When Roosevelt announced this relief program, the largest of the New Deal, he declared, “All work should be useful in the sense of affording permanent improvement in living conditions or of creating future new wealth.” FDR’s standards for WPA have been mocking government employment programs ever since. WPA, commonly known as “We Poke Along,” distributed paychecks to over three million people and is generally credited with giving leaf raking a bad reputation for an entire generation. By 1938 even FDR was embarrassed by his pet program.

The modern era of manpower law opened with the Area Redevelopment Act of 1961, a statute based on the “right” of geographical areas to equal economic development. The Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA) was established to direct federal money and training funds to depressed areas and was expected to play a substantial role in achieving full employment. Like subsequent federal training programs, ARA was based on the idea that jobs should come to people, rather than people going to jobs. ARA was thus the first of many training programs that discouraged individual adjustment.

Many of ARA’s targeted unemployed did not want to learn a new trade. As its first annual report noted, “One of the most serious obstacles was the fact that job opportunities in redevelopment areas were limited because of the long-term economic decline which characterizes those areas.” In ARA’s first year only 6,492 trainees enrolled—and fewer than 1,300 got jobs in fields related to their ARA training. Since unemployment exceeded five million when ARA was enacted, its impact was negligible.

The ARA’s goal was to “create jobs” and give training, but the General Accounting Office (GAO) found that the agency typically overreported the number of jobs created by 128 percent, did not use available information to evaluate the number of new jobs supposedly created, and routinely gave millions of dollars to locales that no longer had high unemployment. By 1965 the ARA had sufficiently discredited itself to be renamed the “Economic Development Administration.” (EDA was eventually also recognized as a four-star boondoggle and was abolished in the early 1980s.)

In 1962 Congress passed the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) to provide training for workers who lost their jobs due to automation or other technological developments. MDTA was hailed by “manpower experts” as the great hope for American workers.

But although MDTA expanded throughout the 1960s, its success was confined largely to political speeches and statistical charades. In a 1972 report the GAO concluded that federal manpower programs were failing on every score—that youth programs were not reducing the high-school dropout rate, that valuable job skills were not being taught, that little effort was being made to place trainees in private jobs, that Department of Labor (DOL) monitoring of contractors was inadequate, and that little follow-up of trainees was occurring. GAO noted, “According to DOL, there is an overriding concern with filling available slots for a particular program rather than with developing the mix of services that the person needs

Renaming the Boondoggle

In 1973, faced with a confusing hodgepodge of floundering training programs, Congress passed the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). In the preface to the new law Congress conceded that “it has been impossible to develop rational priorities” in job training. Existing federal programs were widely perceived as failures, and CETA was supposed to be the cure for all that ailed job training. However, most of the contractors and subcontractors under MDTA were simply given new, often more lucrative grants and contracts under CETA. The same agencies and nonprofit organizations repeated the same mistakes under a new acronym.

CETA began as a training and employment program, but job creation took precedence during the 1974–76 recession. Although the recession was over when President Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, he nonetheless ordered the creation of 350,000 additional public-service jobs by year’s end. Local government officials complained to Congress that the DOL was pressuring them to hire more people than they wanted; officials threatened to withdraw all funds if localities did not spend “another million by Friday.”

CETA gave $500 a month to a communist agitator in Atlanta to, in his words, “organize for demonstration and confrontation.” In Philadelphia 33 Democratic party committeemen or their relatives were put on the CETA payroll. In Chicago the Daley political machine required CETA job applicants to have referral letters from their ward committeemen and left applications without such referrals piled under tables in unopened mail sacks. In Washington, D.C., almost half the city council staff was on the CETA rolls.

CETA was often used to increase demand for other government services. In Maryland CETA workers offered free rides to the welfare office. In New York CETA workers ran a phone service to inform people what unemployment compensation benefits they were entitled to receive.

CETA spent over $175 million on art projects. This was not because CETA expected an increase in the demand for artists or because any inadequacy was identified in existing methods of training artists. CETA spent millions on the arts simply because it thought the arts were a nice thing and that taxpayers should have more of them, whether they liked it or not. In Montgomery County, Maryland, the richest county in the nation, CETA paid nine women $145 a week to attend ballet school. In Poughkeepsie, New York, CETA workers busied themselves attaching fake doors to old buildings to beautify the city.

CETA was a dismal failure for trainees. A DOL-funded study found that CETA recruits had “significantly lower post-program earnings” than similar individuals who never enrolled in CETA. Congress responded by replacing CETA with the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) in 1982. JTPA was more private-sector oriented than CETA, but it was still a creature of politics and bureaucracy. JTPA programs were advised and sometimes directed by local Private Industry Councils.

President Ronald Reagan often bragged that JTPA had a 68 percent job-placement rate for “economically disadvantaged” trainees, as proof of the success of a public-private partnership. Former labor secretary Ray Donovan called JTPA “one of the greatest achievements in the history of government social policy,” and his successor, Bill Brock, called it “a model for human resource programs.” The national 68 percent placement rate was concocted from 50 state measurements with no consistency or uniformity. JTPA’s placement figures were “largely one-day-on-the-job” figures, according to Gary Walker, a New York consultant who evaluated the program for the Ford Foundation.

Welfare for Business

JTPA’s success was a mirage: Instead of serving the hard-to-employ, JTPA was largely a welfare program for business. Most JTPA contractors also provided services under CETA. Once again, the main thing that had changed was the program’s name.

“Customized training”—designing a training program for the specific training needs of an individual company—was a popular JTPA activity. In Cincinnati JTPA paid for in-house training program costs previously assumed by General Electric. In Spring Hill, Tennessee, JTPA paid training costs at General Motors’ new Saturn plant. In New Jersey and Maryland special programs were set up to train people to work at McDonald’s restaurants. McDonald’s would have had to train people anyway. The only difference was who paid for the training.

Where JTPA was not paying for training that would have occurred anyway, it often paid for training for jobs that didn’t exist. In the mining region of Minnesota, unemployment reached 80 percent in some towns. With the decline of the American steel industry, demand for iron ore would remain depressed and new industries were unlikely to enter the area. Yet JTPA poured in money to retrain the locals and help them search for nonexistent jobs.

In Pittsburgh 96 percent of JTPA funds were spent on classroom instruction—even though classroom instruction was known to be the least effective training method. But it was much easier to stick clients in a classroom than to place them in private jobs, so employment and training bureaucrats often favored endless classroom training.

JTPA’s most bizarre feature was its “employment-generating activities.” The Private Industry Councils used tax dollars to advertise and procure federal contracts. Illinois used JTPA funds to set up Procurement Outreach Centers around the state to help local businesses chase federal contracts. In Sacramento JTPA paid for advice on loan packaging, taxes, and employer-employee relations for small businesses.

In 1993 the DOL released a study that revealed that JTPA, like CETA, “actually reduced the earnings” of broad groups of trainees. JTPA was especially vexing to young males, whose earnings after training were 10 percent lower than earnings of similar individuals who avoided the program.

In 1998 JTPA was replaced with the Workplace Investment Act. There is no evidence to presume that government wizards have learned how to square the circle, at least as far as designing effective training programs is concerned.

The federal government has tried every imaginable manpower scheme over 80 years and has failed dismally every time. It cannot create incentives to provide valuable, cost-effective training by doling out billions of dollars. The sooner government stops making false promises and giving people false hope, the sooner that young and low-income people can begin learning real skills in the private sector.

Federal job-training programs will almost always be either unnecessary or worthless. Either the government will be training people for jobs that the private sector would have trained them for anyhow—or the government will be training for jobs that don’t exist. Federal training programs have tended to place people in low-paying jobs, if trainees got jobs at all. If the programs have any effect at all, it is simply to help some low-income people get jobs instead of other low-income people. Rather than creating new training programs, Obama should abolish existing programs and cease promising more than the government can deliver.

Does anyone recognize this typeset?

Unfortunately, this atrocity seems to have been almost completely forgotten in the United States. Perhaps the last time that the most famous momento of that slaughter got any attention was when Colin Powell was shilling at the United Nations in 2003 to whip up support for bombing Iraq.

Here’s an outtake from Maureen Dowd’s excellent New York Times column (February 5, 2003) on that absurdity:

Powell Without Picasso
By MAUREEN DOWD
When Colin Powell goes to the United Nations today to make his
case for war with Saddam, the U.N. plans to throw a blue cover
over Picasso’s antiwar masterpiece, “Guernica.”

Too much of a mixed message, diplomats say. As final
preparations for the secretary’s presentation were being made
last night, a U.N. spokesman explained, “Tomorrow it will be
covered and we will put the Security Council flags in front of
it.”

Mr. Powell can’t very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq
surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men,
children, bulls and horses.

Reporters and cameras will stake out the secretary of state at
the entrance of the U.N. Security Council, where the tapestry
reproduction of “Guernica,” contributed by Nelson Rockefeller,
hangs.

The U.N. began covering the tapestry last week after getting
nervous that Hans Blix’s head would end up on TV next to a
screaming horse head.
______

Geez, I wonder what they would do that painting if Obama was speaking in that venue.